Bitch Creek (32 page)

Chiesa shook his head. “I ain't prepared to say anything about that. That's why I'm here. To investigate. But we only just got the fire put out. Can't rule out arson, but usually these things turn out to be electrical.”

“Has Sheriff Dickman been by?”

“He's been notified. At this point, there's nothing for him.”

“Millie had two cats,” said Calhoun.

“Don't know anything about any cats,” said Chiesa. He looked past Calhoun's shoulder. Calhoun turned around. The fireman had come out of the house and was standing there with his eyebrows arched. “What've you got, Eddie?” Chiesa said to the fireman.

“Somethin' you oughta take a look at, sir.”

Chiesa nodded. “Okay. Be right there.” He turned to Calhoun. “Do me a favor, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Don't go spreading rumors. I don't want the word ‘arson' being bandied about down in Jacob Barnes's back room. I know there'll be plenty of speculating. But I don't want anyone saying that Fire Marshal Jack Chiesa is talking about arson. You got that?”

Calhoun nodded. “No problem.”

“One other thing,” said Chiesa.

“Yes?”

“Git on out of here. No offense, but just stay the hell away. Let us do our job.”

“You got it,” said Calhoun.

He went back to the truck. Ralph was sitting behind the wheel. “Shove over,” Calhoun told him. Ralph shoved over, and Calhoun climbed in.

It took about a half hour to drive to the hospital in Rochester. He left the truck in the shade of a maple tree on the edge of the parking lot, cracked the windows, and told Ralph to sit tight. Then he went in.

The woman at the desk told him that Millie Dobson was in Intensive Care and could not see visitors. She knew nothing of Millie's condition.

Calhoun thanked her and went over to the elevators across the lobby. The directory indicated that the ICU was on the second floor. He found the stairway and went up.

Two nurses were seated behind a chest-high horseshoe-shaped counter. One of them was bent over a clipboard. The other had her back to Calhoun and was watching a bank of computer screens behind them, which beeped a quiet, syncopated tune as lines and graphs moved across the screens.

Calhoun leaned his elbows on the counter and said, “Excuse me.” 

The nurse with the clipboard looked up. “Yes?”

“I came to see Millie Dobson.”

She looked to be somewhere in her fifties. She wore a pale blue cardigan sweater over a white blouse. She had iron-gray hair and sharp blue eyes and a soft, matronly body. “No visitors, sir.”

“I'm her brother.”

The nurse cocked her head. Then she smiled, and wrinkles spread across her face. “Sure you are.”

“Can you tell me how she is?”

“She's not out of the woods. Still unconscious. They may have to operate.”

“Operate?” said Calhoun. “I thought . . .” He shook his head. “She was in a fire. Smoke inhalation or something.”

“It's the head injury the doctors are worried about. She took quite a severe blow.”

“Head injury? How . . .?”

The nurse shrugged. “They figure she bumped into something or maybe fell down trying to get out in the dark. They don't know. She has a fractured skull. The doctors're worried about subdural bleeding.” 

“Jesus,” he muttered. “Look. I got to see her.”

“And you're her brother.”

“That's right.”

“Your name Dobson?”

“No. I'm Calhoun. Dobson is Millie's married name.”

The nurse flipped through her clipboard. “It says here she's not married.”

“She was,” said Calhoun. “She divorced. She kept his name.”

The nurse grinned and shook her head. “You really want to see her, don't you, brother?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

She narrowed her eyes at him for a moment, then nodded. “Come on. Just for a minute.”

The nurse came out from behind the counter and led him around the corner. Millie's bed sat in the middle of a small room, surrounded by machines. A bulky bandage covered her head like a turban. A tube was clamped to her nostrils. More tubes snaked down to her wrist, which was taped to a board. Still another snuck out from under the thin blanket that covered her and emptied into a bag attached to the foot of her bed. Wires crawled out from under the blanket that covered her chest and ran to different machines.

She looked small and gray and old and utterly lifeless.

Calhoun blew out a breath.

The nurse touched his arm. “I'll give you five minutes. Talk to her if you want. For heaven's sake, don't touch anything.”

He nodded, still staring at Millie.

He was aware of the nurse leaving. “Hey, Millie,” he said. “Can you hear me?”

She gave no indication that she'd heard him.

“It's Stoney,” he said. “I came to remind you about our dinner date. You better not let me down. I'm really looking forward to it. We'll dress all fancy, have some expensive wine, maybe go dancing afterwards.”

 Millie's body remained motionless, but Calhoun thought he could see her eyes rolling under her eyelids. He moved close to her. “What happened, Millie?” he said. “Who did this to you? I wish you could tell me what happened. I wish you could tell me if this is my fault.”

She gave him no response.

He moved back from her bed, leaned against the wall, folded his arms across his chest, and watched her face. The machines lined up beside her bed ticked and hummed and breathed in the hospital silence.

Then the nurse was at the door. “You've got to leave,” she said.

He nodded, went over and touched Millie's cheek, turned, and followed the nurse out of the room.

Back at the counter, he took one of Kate's business cards from his wallet and wrote his phone number on it. “Please,” he said. “If there's any change—anything—let me know.”

She took the card from him, glanced at it, and said, “Sure, brother Calhoun. We'll let you know. You're her, um, next of kin?”

“Yes,” he said. “I guess you could call me that.”

F
IRST
L
YLE
.

Now Millie.

Calhoun and Ralph were sitting side by side on one of the tumbleddown slabs of granite, formerly the foundation of the bridge that had spanned the little creek behind his house. The brook trout had started sipping mayfly spinners, which were washing down the quickening current where the creek narrowed. Two fish had moved up to the head of the pool where the riffle slowed and flattened. The third trout, the biggest, held himself suspended directly under a tuft of overhanging grass tight against the far bank in a little eddy formed by a submerged rock.

That was the one Calhoun tried to catch mentally. The others were too easy.

He was convinced that what had happened to Millie was his fault, just as he knew that Lyle wouldn't have been murdered if he—Calhoun himself—had taken Fred Green / Lawrence Potter fishing like he was supposed to. Millie had been doing him a favor, and now she was in the hospital.

He got close to somebody, let them into his heart, and then something happened to them. Calhoun suspected that was the story of his entire life, although he did not know that story very well.

“Simplify, simplify,” Thoreau had said. Calhoun realized he had let too much complication enter his life. He hadn't intended it. He hadn't wanted it. If he'd been stronger, it wouldn't have happened. But he'd let Lyle become his best friend, and he'd allowed himself to love Kate. He'd guided and worked in the shop. He'd made friends with Millie and Sheriff Dickman and Jacob and Marcus, and recently Anna and David Ross. And nothing good had come of it. Now Lyle was dead and Millie lay in a coma and Lawrence Potter was trying to kill him, too.

Well, he'd have to settle it. Then maybe he would return to the woods and start over. He would concentrate on providing himself with food, clothing, shelter, and fuel, the necessities that Thoreau had correctly identified. He would shun luxuries. He would try to convince himself that love was a luxury, and he'd try to convince Kate of it, too.

He had come directly home after leaving Millie's bedside in the hospital in Rochester. On the drive back to Dublin, he'd made himself a promise: No more snooping around. There'd be no more investigating and asking questions and putting his friends at risk for Stoney Calhoun. He'd already done enough harm.

For the third consecutive night, he prepared to keep his vigil. He found himself feeling almost eager for it. His body had begun to adjust its rhythms to sitting alert and awake through the darkest hours of the night. He'd tuned in to the nocturnal life that scurried and flapped and slinked and buzzed in the dark. He'd heard coyotes howl, and he'd seen the slow-moving shadows of raccoons and opossums in the trees. There were nighthawks and bats and moths, flying squirrels and porcupines and deer. The gurgle of his creek sounded richer and more melodious in the night air, and he knew his trout slurped insects off its surface all night long.

He recalled a fragment of a Whitman poem. It had struck him so strongly when he'd read it in his anthology that he'd stopped to underline the words, and just the act of underlining them had caused him to memorize them:

I am he that walks with the tender and growing night.

I call to the earth and the sea half held by the night,

Press close bare-bosomed night—press close, magnetic, nourishing night!

Night of south winds—night of the large few stars!

Still, nodding night—mad, naked summer night.

And so Calhoun found himself eager to get on with it.

At midnight, Calhoun and Ralph went outside. He moved to a different location, this time almost directly across the clearing from the house, not far from where the man with the .22 rifle had been standing when he'd fired two shots at Calhoun's chest on Sunday night.

He wore what he'd come to think of as his night watchman's uniform: black baseball cap, dark blue sweatshirt, blue jeans, sneakers. He sat back against a tree and spread the army blanket over his legs. His thermos of coffee stood on the ground by his left hand, his shotgun lay across his lap, and Ralph had coiled up within reach of his right hand.

The moon was a slender comma low in the sky. There were no clouds, and the bright and abundant stars bathed the clearing in pale yellow light.

Calhoun sat and waited. He was relaxed, absolutely comfortable, but alert, not the slightest bit tired despite three nights of very little sleep. His mind was clear and empty, and he thought idly that he probably could just sit out there in the nighttime forever, mindless and comfortable and content.

After an hour, he poured some coffee. Ralph lifted his head, verified that nothing interesting had happened, and dropped it back onto his paws.

After another hour or so—Calhoun checked his mental clock and guessed it was around two o'clock—he reached down for the thermos to pour himself a refill. As he did, he heard a soft shuffling sound down toward the place where the dirt driveway opened into the clearing.

He stared hard in the direction of the noise.

Deer again, probably. Or coyote or porcupine. During the past couple of nights, he'd heard many sounds.

Then he heard it again, and he identified it as a new sound. Not a deer. Not any of the animal sounds he'd been hearing in the woods at night.

In his imagination, at least, it was the sound of a man's boot sliding over damp leaves, a man trying very hard to walk silently, a man who lifted a foot and placed it in front of him carefully, feeling the ground with that front foot before transferring his weight to it, and then slowly lifting his back foot, sliding it across the ground before swinging it forward.

It was the sound of that back foot scraping across the top of last year's fallen leaves that Calhoun had heard.

Ralph sat up quickly. His ears were cocked forward and a low whine came from his throat. He stopped whining when Calhoun put a hand on his back. Calhoun could feel the dog trembling.

Then he spotted the shadow edging through the bushes, approaching his house, moving so slowly that it seemed almost motionless. This was an upright shadow, not the horizontal shape of a deer.

It was the shadow of a man, bent forward, moving carefully, keeping himself screened in the shadows of the undergrowth along the edge of the clearing.

Calhoun touched Ralph's head. “Lie down,” he whispered.

Ralph lay down.

He tapped his muzzle. “Stay.”

He slowly pushed the blanket off his legs. He held his Remington in both hands and eased himself to his feet, bent forward, crouching, never taking his eyes off that moving shadow that was creeping toward his house.

He began to move to his left. He'd swing a circle around the back of the house and intercept the man on the other side. He had studied this route in the daytime, planned it for the time when he'd need it, and the path was imprinted on his brain. There were rocks and rotten stumps and patches of briar, but Calhoun knew where they were and how to skirt them. He kept to the thick screen of hemlocks, where the shadows were black and a century of fallen needles made a soft soundless cushion under his feet.

Just before he passed behind the house, he stopped and peered out into the clearing.

He could not see the man, who was making his approach from the opposite side, moving as stealthily as Calhoun.

He tried to figure the man's plan. Slip in through the front door? Look in the windows, locate his quarry asleep in the bedroom, and shoot from there?

The only people who had been in his house, who knew the location of his bedroom, were Kate and Lyle and Sheriff Dickman and the Man in the Suit.

He slipped out of the woods and up to the rear of the house. He stopped, leaned his back against the outside wall, and listened.